


Fallen Alien

by Visityr (MickeyWay)



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Castiel Character Study (Supernatural), M/M, Pining
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-16
Packaged: 2021-03-12 06:48:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29505747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MickeyWay/pseuds/Visityr
Summary: Sometimes when he gets what he wants, Dean takes him by the tie and drags him in closer, and his heated breath ghosts over Cas’s face before their lips connect - even in dreams all graceless teeth and tongue, messy and uncoordinated, hands shoved under shirts and the scrape of brick against exposed skin.Sometimes when he gets what he wants, he cracks Dean across his star-freckled face with just an ounce of the power he could put into a punch, and feels his nose snap under the pressure.-This series loosely follows the timeline of Supernatural, and each chapter can be kind of thrown in anywhere and fit. That's why it's canon-divergence. Essentially it all boils down to: but what if Cas was human... permanently? How would he come to terms with that? How would that affect things? Especially in regards to his relationship with Dean. It's a character study, essentially.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Kudos: 3





	1. Firsts

**Author's Note:**

> Castiel should have gotten to be angry more often: the thesis: the fic. 
> 
> Title comes from the song by FKA Twigs. 
> 
> Please enjoy.

Their first kiss took Cas by surprise.

Eighteen days into hunting a coven in rural Connecticut, Sam, in an ever-more-common bout of frustration, stood up and left the hotel room without any prompting. This usually meant he was going for a run, but he could be gone for hours when his mood turned this way. Unluckily for Castiel, this also usually brought Dean's mood from his typical faux-lightheartedness to downright sour.

Making yourself scarce is nearly impossible in a two-bed hotel room, which meant Cas stayed sitting on Sam's bed, holding Sam's laptop on his lap and trying to press the letter-buttons slowly; so their tap-tap-tap wouldn't irritate the other man sharing the room. 

Dean Winchester was cleaning his gun, with that stone-serious expression on his face that meant he was trying very hard not to think about things, and failing. He set the pieces of the gun down on the bed beside him, and paused to pinch the area where his hand dips between his thumb and pointer finger. 

Cas knew how that muscle twinged there; the curled remnants of breaks and sprains coalescing into a little electric shock when the nerve pinches between two off-kilter muscles. Castiel knew because he'd taken particular care with Dean's hands when he'd rebuilt them. Bone by bone, he'd patched hairline fractures and splits, smoothed the arthritis forming in the joints, restructured the way Dean's ring and pinkie finger had healed from years old breaks. He'd never learned how Dean had broken them, but he'd imagined it. He imagined the creation of all the wounds on Dean's body, trying to carry these burdens, if he could. 

Castiel didn't understand, yet; even rebuilt, Dean still carried his body like a broken man. You can soothe the wound, but you cannot undo the way it taught him to walk. 

Dean was looking at him, then, face stern and almost darkly amused, but eyes vulnerable - almost afraid. Like a cornered animal. "Cas, man. You're staring." 

Castiel blinked. Oh. He had been staring. "You're beautiful." He said simply. As with most of his attempts with human language, it was not exactly what he meant, but the closest approximation. He misses angelic telepathy. He glanced down at Dean's hands again, how they tighten - probably painfully - in response. Castiel misses angelic healing, too. He looked back up at Dean's face. Dean was flinching.

"You can't just say shit like that." Dean said, like beauty is an insult. 

"Why not?" Cas replied, "It is the truth. You are beautiful." Dean looked away, almost grimacing as he stood, leaving the gun on the bed. Castiel's brow furrowed. He'd made him uncomfortable. "I am talking about your soul." He added, hoping that would help. 

Dean let out a hint of a laugh - self deprecating, but a laugh. "That's not better." He stilled then, standing by the edge of the bed. Cas looked up at him, his head tilted slightly in confusion. Dean's eyes softened, filled with something warm. All in one motion, he leaned down and pressed their lips together. 

Castiel, for a moment, thought his heart was going to burst. He worried about that for less than a second before he moved his hands to Dean's face, closed his eyes, and leaned into the kiss. Sam's laptop tilted dangerously in his lap. Dean made a gentle noise before he pulled away. 

Castiel's joy was so big he could not even smile, just stare reverently at the righteous man he held in his hands. For one beatific second Dean almost looked pleased with himself, but a dark shadow climbed over his features to shrink him back, to pull him out of Cas' hands. 

Shame. Castiel knew that one, but not like this. 

Dean shook his head like he could rattle the moment out of his memory, and he said nothing as he darted out the front door, shoulders hunched. 

Castiel looked at the door for a long moment, sorrow broiling to anger in the empty, graceless hole inside of him. It was a big anger, broad and lingering in its totality. When he tried to put a name to it, words to it, he failed, and looked back to his webpage on witches instead. 

He'd held Dean in his hands for so long, remolded him like a sculptor finding the man within the marble. Every sinew, every atom, he'd cleaned and reformed and made anew -

and the man would only ever consider himself dirty. 

Months later, Castiel finds a word in the English language to describe the source of his anger. Injustice. 


	2. Dreams

Sometimes, when he manages to sleep, despite the cold uneven mattress and the too-near highway’s brutal attempts to keep him awake, Castiel dreams.

Sometimes in the dreams he gets what he wants, though he’s not yet sure what that is.

Cas sees, from what is almost an outsider's perspective (omniscient, ironically), himself pushing Dean up against a rough brick wall, spitting words in his face like he did years ago. “I rebelled and I did it - all of it - for you.”

Sometimes when he gets what he wants, Dean takes him by the tie and drags him in closer, and his heated breath ghosts over Cas’s face before their lips connect - even in dreams all graceless teeth and tongue, messy and uncoordinated, hands shoved under shirts and the scrape of brick against exposed skin.

Sometimes when he gets what he wants, he cracks Dean across his star-freckled face with just an ounce of the power he could put into a punch, and feels his nose snap under the pressure. Hot red blood pours down Dean’s face, and when he spits it out it splatters like red echoes of freckles across Cas’ face. He never hits him again, just holds him by the lapels of his father’s leather jacket and pushes him against the brick wall, searching in the endless green eyes for some reason _why_.

The dreams don’t ever overlap, and Cas finds some strange relief in this. That his love (desire?) for Dean and his anger at Dean have yet to mesh in his strange still newly human mind.

He is alone in Illinois.


	3. Lies

****

Strangely enough, Dean calls six months after he told Cas to leave. It is not to the exact date, but close enough in ugly proximity to the half year anniversary that when Cas sees the number on the screen he becomes aware that it has been almost six months.

He looks at the phone screen for a long few moments as it rings, his key half slotted into the door of his shoebox apartment in Atkinson, Illinois. He looks at the phone ringing for so long it stops ringing, and there’s a sharp tugging of terror in his chest that momentarily makes it hard to breathe. He’s gone, Dean’s gone, he’s called and Cas didn’t answer, and he’s not going to call back. Cas inhales sharply, unlocking the door and stepping in, closing the door behind him a little firmer than he wants. He moves fast enough he almost trips over his shoes, sets the phone down like a burning plate. He stares at it again: willing it to ring, willing it to stay silent.

Dean doesn’t call back.

Cas leaves the phone on the counter.

Castiel considers the day he learned to lie.

It was long before the birth of Christ, and, terrifyingly, he no longer remembers the precise date. Human memory clouds like the fogged up glass in the back of the-

He doesn’t remember the exact date; it was before the birth of Christ. He was young, very young, new to the ability to answer prayers, to grant miracles (they were always required to be conservative; quotas and caps, Heaven was a corporation long before he learned it too was corrupt). The grieving woman who’d called was caring for her sick child. His fever was high, eyes dull and rolled back in his head, skin sallow and thin. He hadn’t eaten in days, had taken to shaking in his sleep.

She’d prayed, and Castiel had answered. Taking the form of another child in the village, a child named… named…? - who’d offered anything he could give to help his friend. Castiel came to the woman in the night. He’d explained who he was, and the grieving woman had required no proof before she fell to her knees in rapturous thanks. She had led him to her son, and Castiel had held out a healing hand only to be met with the hard chill of failure. The boy was too far gone to be healed. He’d stepped back, and the moment’s silence felt like years.

The first miracles are the hardest, Elder angels say; for every prayer you answer, you must not allow a thousand more.

Castiel had looked into the grieving mother’s aching eyes, this was her only living son. She had walked for months across the beating desert and lost the younger two on the way. She was going to lose her final son. There was nothing he could do.

He told her that the boy was needed in Heaven, something he could not explain, but she would certainly see when she joined him in her old age. The grieving woman wept tears of joy, hope - humans think of heaven as a continuance of life, a pass from room to room.

It was a merciful lie. It was a merciful, selfish lie.

Dean calls again in the morning, at quarter after ten. Castiel cannot let it ring through again. It rings a second time as he stalls over the green accept call button. He manages to force himself to press it during the third ring, and it’s like his heart is razed over coals at the sound of Dean’s voice.

“Cas?” And it is so much _worse_ when he says his name, chopped up and shortened and all the angelic imposition lost. It’s all Dean - to take what is holy and hold it close and to by nature change it.

“Dean.” Cas says back.

“You’re- you’re okay? Bobby said, uh- said that you’d sounded off the last time he talked to you. Said you sounded, uh-” Dean stalls, (Cas recalls in their last conversation he had told Bobby that he would prefer to be left out of his sphere of concern, thank you very much) “rough.”

That was two months previous. Castiel wonders when Bobby had told Dean. He can’t help the lick of bitter joy it brings him to think Dean might have known for longer, might have held his phone in his hunter’s hands and found himself buried in guilt when he tried to call and found himself unable. Castiel’s mind circles like a vulture over the image of Dean with his face pressed against his arm in the impala, hand clutching the phone he couldn’t bring himself to dial, because he knows they cannot talk again without addressing it. He doesn’t want to call and pretend anymore, he doesn’t want to lie to himself about this anymore.

Castiel considers the day he learned to lie, and he recalls with a bitter heartache the grieving woman’s gentle green eyes.

“I’m fine.” Castiel says, his voice neutral and easy.

It is a merciful, selfish, cowardly lie.


End file.
